DVD club

GoodFellas

The first cycle of classic Hollywood gangster movies ended in 1935 when the Hayes Office censors clamped down on the representation of, to use the title of Robert Warshow's celebrated 1948 essay, 'The Gangster as Tragic Hero'. The censors insisted the FBI become the heroes. The next major gangster cycle began in 1967, the year the Hays Code was abandoned, with Bonnie and Clyde and The St Valentine's Day Massacre, and continues to this day. Its great peaks are the works of Italian-Americans - Coppola's The Godfather, De Palma's Scarface and Scorsese's GoodFellas

In some ways, a companion piece or continuation of his first major movie, Mean Streets (1973), GoodFellas follows the lives of three New York criminals played by Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, who pay allegiance to Mafia bosses as they rob, kill, torture and enjoy the high life and respect they seem to earn. Things fall apart when drugs become their chief commodity, to which Liotta, the chief figure, based on real-life crook Henry Hill, becomes addicted. His back against the wall, Liotta/Hill tells all and enters the federal witness protection scheme.

This brilliant, nuanced movie looks at crime as a way of life, a valid career choice, and it invites us to share its attractions. In two unforgettable long takes employing a hand-held camera, we're taken on a seductive tour of a restaurant meeting between good fellas and wise guys and then into the Copacabana night club, with Hill escorting his future wife to a front-row seat. We later share the hero's vertiginous downfall.